Kayla > Kayla's Quotes

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

--Alexander Supertramp, May 1992”
― Christopher McCandless

“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I now walk into the wild.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“The baby, a girl, is born at 6:24 a.m.
She weighs six pounds, ten ounces.
The mother takes the baby in her arms and asks her, "Who are you, my little one?"
And in response, this baby, who is Liz and not Liz at the same time, laughs.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (although not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“If your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence, Liz finds um strangely appropriate. Um means nothing. Um is what you say while you're thinking of what you'll really say. Um suggests someone interrupted before they'd begun. Um is a fifteen-year-old girl who gets hit by a taxicab in front of a mall on the way to help pick out a prom dress for a prom she isn't even going to, for God's sake.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.”
― Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“Life is short, but it is wide. Genevieve Whitman taught me that.”
― Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Penpal

“Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Penpal

“Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time.
So we keep them in our memories.
And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Penpal

“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“- Why me?
- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
- Yes.
- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Goodness me, the clock has struck-
Alackday, and fuck my luck.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly